Grit Lab Report

Hi Penn, Collin,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 2: I have 2 or 3 emerging interests but am unsure how to figure out which one to pursue .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were self-direction, achievement, and universalism.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was openness.

You said your top three talents were verbal, analytic, and social.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you felt totally clear about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to complete a psychology independent study .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said read a book for leisure .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Expand my mind .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said I’m lazy .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I feel anxious I will go for a run .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in Reading .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt when receiving critical feedback, and when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling a lot of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being health .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to .

In one word, you said it made you feel Warm .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

"It's my duty and privilege to milk 100% of my potential out of myself"
Interest comes from experience, not introspection
Within person personality variance is greater than between person
Curiosity conversations are more effective than searches
Positive fantasizing is indulgent
Growth comes from struggling through personal challenges

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Brandon Wang
I really enjoyed being in a team together for Grit Lab! I feel like you always had something thoughtful to say during our discussions. You also asked some pretty good questions which I appreciated. Overall, thanks for being super chill to talk to this semester! I also learned a lot from your Discovery Project presentation. I like how deeply you've looked into various career options around psychiatry and clinical psychology. I just learned what the difference between those two is from your presentation. After hearing about the things you considered, I think you're definitely on the right track and have thought very carefully about your options.
Jimin Oh
I really admired Collin’s application in this class - he was always able to demonstrate his knowledge and experience in psychology. I feel that his ability to do so really contributed positively to our conversations and enriched our understanding of class material as well as lead us to questions beyond the material. I was really impressed by Collin’s thoroughness in the class, and really felt that his interest and excellence in psychology shone through the entire class. I am extremely lucky to have been able to meet Collin and I truly wish him luck as he continues to thrive in psychology! Collin’s discovery project was extremely impressive in its thoroughness. I really felt the depth of Collin’s research and his eagerness for knowledge. I thought that his core topic of a career conflict was extremely relatable and I was really impressed by the different avenues he explored and the depth at which he was able to make connections and explore. He inspired me to further probe into my professional journey, and explore what really aligns with my interests rather than stopping at just the surface level.
Keara Mcgowan
Dear Collin, First, I want to express how much of a joy it has been to get to know you this semester. You are genuinely so kind and easy to talk to, and I always loved our little conversations throughout Grit Lab catching up with each other. You were so relatable on so many levels, whether it was that I found someone else who trusts their mom’s advice as much as me or that we’d rant about our procrastination habits from the past weekend. By the way, I am still astonished that Chipotle has salads and ever since you brought it that one day in class, I keep meaning to go there and try their salad lol. We should definitely grab coffee sometime next semester to catch up and see how life is post-Grit Lab :). I really appreciated your Discovery Project, as it was comforting to me and I’m sure many others. The environment at Penn makes it seem like everyone has everything figured out, but in reality a majority of people pivot in regards to what they think they want to do coming into college versus what they actually end up doing. It was super interesting to hear about your journey of learning more about psychiatry. I found it especially fascinating how you learned from one of the doctors you spoke to that even though you may think you’re interested in psychiatry, it may not be the best path for you and you can incorporate it into your life in other ways. I feel like this is important information to hear at a school like Penn, because there seems to be so much pressure to know what exactly we are passionate about and that we must pursue that in life, however there are so many different directions we can take!

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.